5 Inexpensive ways to improve your online marketing

by Elliot Betancourt on January 19, 2016

If you have a modest online marketing budget, knowing how to make the best of it can feel like an impossible task. Should you risk it all with paid search? Will SEO take effect before the funds run out? Should you try advertising on Houzz? Or invest in blogger outreach as an effective way to market to interior designers?

The good news is that whether you’re planning on upping your online spend or looking for ways to tighten the purse strings, there are a number of ways to improve your digital marketing frugally.

Trade paid search for paid social

Paid search advertising is incredibly competitive and as an auction based system, prices will continue to rise as long as competition exists. Many small businesses find platforms like AdWords simply too expensive. Paid social is a cost effective alternative – consider Facebook or the newly launched Instagram advertising offering as an inexpensive way to raise your profile. Paid social works in a similar way to PPC with the added advantage of lots of advanced targeting options (device, interest, gender, location are just a few of the options).

Curate content instead of creating

Outsourcing content production can be expensive. If you don’t have the expertise in house to create sizzling articles, blogs and infographics, try curation as an inexpensive yet effective alternative. You can do this manually by searching out interesting content to share or pay for a low cost curation tool to take the leg work out of researching.

Try blogger outreach

Outreach can be an incredibly effective way of gaining more traffic. It allows you to tap in to someone else’s audience without spending the time or resources to build that following. It’s also inexpensive – simply compile a list of bloggers relevant to your brand, brainstorm possible collaboration options and then start making contact.

Increase your social media

Social media is now a key driver of SEO and a place where many purchases begin. Increase the volume of your social media postings to start driving more traffic. The added benefit of this is that Google now indexes social media content such as tweets. So the more often you post, the more search engine real estate you can take up – increasing visibility at no extra cost.

Create a mobile site

Creating a mobile site is no longer vastly expensive. Google has said that it now handles more mobile than desktop searches. This means if you are playing the odds, a strong mobile presence is the way to go.